Jaunt – Meet the Crazy Camera That Can Make Movies for the Oculus Rift (Jordan Kushins-Gizmodo)

Oculus Rift (Photo credit: Digitas Photos)

If Facebook buying Oculus for a cool $2 billion is a step towards democratizing the currently-niche platform, Jaunt seems like an equally monumental step towards making awesome virtual reality content that appeals to folks beyond the gaming community. The VR movies in addition to VR games.

Amazing story about a stealthy little company with a 3D video recording rig. This isn’t James Cameron like motion capture for 3D rendering. This is just 2D video in real time stitched together. No modeling, or texture-mapping, or animating required. Just run the video camera, capture the footage, bring it back to the studio and stitch it all together. Watch the production on your Oculus Rift head set. If you can produce 3D movies with this without having to invest in the James Cameron high end, ultra-expensive virtual sets, you just lowered the barriers to entry.

I’m also kind of disappointed that in the article the author keeps insisting that you “had to be there”. Telling us words cannot express the experience is like telling me in writing the “dog ate my homework”. I guess I “had to be there” for that too. Anyway you put it, telling me more about the company and the premises and about the prototypes means you’re writing for a Venture Capital audience, not someone who might make work using the camera or those who might consume the work made by the artists working with the camera. I say just cave into the temptation and TRY expressing the experience in words. Don’t worry if you fail, as you’ve just increased the comment rate on your story, engaging people longer after the initial date the story was published. In spite off the lack of daring, to describe the experience, I picked up enough detail, extrapolated it enough and read between the lines in a way that indicates this camera rig might well be the killer app, or authoring app for the Oculus Rift platform. Let’s hope it sees the light of day and makes it market quicker than the Google Glass prototypes floating around these days.